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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday February 07 2018, @04:40PM   Printer-friendly
from the an-ATM-in-reverse dept.

UK 'could adopt Norway recycling system'

A Scandinavian system for recycling bottles is thought likely to be adopted in the UK. Advisers to government say the schemes have massively reduced plastic litter in the environment and seas. And a ministerial delegation has been to Norway to see if the UK should copy an industry-led scheme that recycles 98% of bottles. In the UK, figures show that only around half of all plastic bottles get recycled.

Norway claims to offer the most cost-efficient way of tackling plastic litter. The Norwegian government decided the best method would be to put a tax on every bottle that's not recycled - then leave the operating details of the scheme up to business.

It works like this: the consumer pays a deposit on every bottle, from 10p to 25p depending on size. They return it empty and post it into a machine which reads the barcode and produces a coupon for the deposit. If the careless consumer has left liquid in the bottle, the machine eats it anyway - but hands the deposit to the shopkeeper who'll need to empty the bottle.

Similar schemes are in operation in other Nordic nations, Germany, and some states in the US and Canada.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 07 2018, @05:41PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 07 2018, @05:41PM (#634452)

    Those machines are quite common in Michigan, but we've got a $0.10 deposit on cans/bottles so a huge portion of them come back to the store. I want to say it's something like 90% of the bottles/cans come back, but I can't remember where I heard that number. At that rate, having a machine count them makes sense.

    At $0.05, it just isn't worth it to bring them in for many people. That's doubly true if you're in a city where stuff is more expensive to begin with. Why bother with a machine if returns are rare in the first place?

  • (Score: 1) by starvingboy on Wednesday February 07 2018, @07:12PM (1 child)

    by starvingboy (6766) on Wednesday February 07 2018, @07:12PM (#634496)

    The $.10 Michigan deposit bought me a lot of candy as a kid. We'd scrounge all OVER the place for cans and bottles. Some even had the pull-tab tops, but if you mixed 'em in with a few other cans, the clerk would overlook it and give you a dime anyway.

    It kept things tidy, and gave kids pocket money. Win/Win.

    • (Score: 2) by dry on Thursday February 08 2018, @02:16AM

      by dry (223) on Thursday February 08 2018, @02:16AM (#634636) Journal

      Yea, collecting bottles used to be profitable. When they went to a nickel here, a chocolate bar was still a dime, and likewise, when they went to a dime, a chocolate bar was around a quarter.
      30 odd years later, I took a couple of garbage bags of bottles, cans, juice boxes etc into the bottle depot, seems most stores no longer take bottles, and got about 5 bucks. Those small bottles/cans are still worth a dime and the bottle depot only gives you half the value, and a chocolate bar at a corner store is probably $2.
      Felt I'd wasted my time taking them in compared to just throwing them in the recycling and really wonder about the homeless who I see with big bags of bottles/cans that they take from peoples recycling boxes, fuck they must have to work to get anything.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Wednesday February 07 2018, @07:14PM

    by frojack (1554) on Wednesday February 07 2018, @07:14PM (#634498) Journal

    I noticed recently the number of states where there is a deposit has been steadily dropping, as curbside recycling programs expand state wide. I've lived in states which tried the fee method, and everybody hated it, especially the retailers who had to put up with people dragging in bags of poorly cleaned plastics/glass/cans into their clean stores. It was largely an under-funded mandate and nobody liked it.

    The culture of recycling is slowly taking over, but the success rate varies dramatically around the country.

    We are quibbling about where the sorting is done. And to a lesser extent, who pays. Because recycling is not cost effective when all costs are considered.
    The quaint idea that recycling pays for itself is about as bogus as saying prisons turning out model citizens. There is just no market for this stuff.

    Where I now live there is mandatory curbside recycling county wide, and I think this applies to most counties in the state except the really rural farm areas. (You can opt out, but then you have to haul your own recyclables, because trash pickup won't accept them). The recycling extends to everything, un-sorted, glass, plastic, metals, paper, cardboard.

    The sorting is moved to the back end, (post consumer) because the consumer side is horrible at this, even with the best of intentions. I'm not convinced a row of machines accepting only specific recyclables and rejecting others is any better than bulk recycle to automated separation/sort facilities. Its just more fiddling with who sorts and who pays.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 07 2018, @07:30PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 07 2018, @07:30PM (#634511)

    Yeah i only took those cans and bottles there couple of times, cause it was a little bit out of the way, so i didn't want to drive there too much. But the sites i've been to, you could probably make 50-200 USD a week just collecting the cans and bottles and if you were smart, just ask people to put them in a different container and you wouldn't have to dumpster dive. Easy money!

    As i have always taken the cans and bottles back to shops, it just horrifies and saddens me that places like California it's seems so impossible and how much plastic and aluminium is just taken to dumps and thrown to ocean just because there are no collection machines around.